Yesterday was the last sunset here for the next 4 months. What a weird thought! The latitude of 77 degrees and change south latitude brings the sun out full-time until around February 21st, approximately. That will be about when I'm heading home. Some local wag has posted a flyer asking for sacrificial virgins for a supposed pagan ceremony today. I would love to see an atlas to see what the comparable latitude in Alaska and Canada might run.
Because of all the flights into and out of here, there is an amazing array of experts here to give flight weather predictions. McMurdo is the center of it all, but there are observers in all the remote field camps and at the Pole and a network of automated weather stations all over the continent, including one on the shoulder of Mt. Erebus. Here's a pretty good place to check out the weather here, but keep in mind that experienced hands here laugh at the predictions even the local forecasters make, so it's hard to know what Wunderground's reliability might be:
http://www.wunderground.com/cgi-bin/findweather/hdfForecast?query=mcmurdo+station&searchType=WEATHER
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| These are known as Baslers, which are thoroughly modernized versions of the C-47 (military version of the civilian DC-3 . |
One of the interesting things I heard yesterday is that one of the reasons they cancel flights to the Pole is a temperature of -57. The C-47s are not allowed to be flown into that sort of weather even if the sky is cloudless and the winds light. The Twin Otters are scheduled to be coming in a few days.
Yesterday I noticed the snow softening up. Rather than being hard and bearing one's weight, it was soft and you could sink in to it. Maybe even perfect for snowballs?
The big news is that tomorrow "evening" (what is evening but an arbitrary social construct when it's light all day long?) the entire department is going on a training trip to Cape Evans. That's the location of Scott's second hut and it's the much better preserved of the two. It was found some years after he had used it filled with snow and had to be dug out, but it's much truer to the original condition than the nearby one at Hut Point. The second was built after one of his ships was crushed by ice when moored off the hut here. His thought was that, by being closer to the margin of the sea ice and open water, it would be a safer spot to anchor. There is a large ice berg that calved off last year that is frozen into the sea ice. It's supposed to be an eerily beautiful color of blue. Return here to read more about it on Saturday (Friday in the US).
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